


Cross Wired

by PrettyArbitrary



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: All the warnings, Asphyxiation, Bad Decisions, Bloodplay, Bondage, Captivity, Dark!fluff, Discussion of Major Character Death, Dubious Consent, Knifeplay, M/M, Poor John, Possessive Behavior, Rape, Rough Sex, Sensory Deprivation, Snuff fantasies, This is why you don't read other peoples diaries, Triggers, Unsafe Sex, Violent sexual fantasies, it's not as dark as the tags make it seem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-05
Updated: 2012-03-05
Packaged: 2017-11-01 04:28:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/351941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John reads Sherlock's diary.  It turns out that this is not his first mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cross Wired

**Author's Note:**

> No Johns were (non-consensually) harmed in the making of this fic. However, this fic contains graphic, violent sexual fantasies from the point of the assailant. If that creeps you the hell out or, worse, triggers you, then seriously, don't read this.
> 
> On the other hand, it all turns out fine! Really!
> 
> Written, naturally, [for a kink_meme prompt.](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/12432.html?thread=64474000#t64474000) Betaed by the redoubtable gelishan and thisprettywren, without whom this would not be half as twisted, or half as finished.

_When I see that scar, I have to suppress the urge to dig my fingers in until it tears open. That wound should be mine._

The little notebook fell open among the stack of papers John had knocked into. Sherlock’s thin, spiky handwriting always had a way of drawing his eye; he read that first line before he knew what he was doing.

He kept on reading because he wasn’t superhuman. Which was a terrible shame, John thought, because he would’ve appreciated the power to erase his own memory just about now.

_Unbearable, to look at that mark and think that someone else pierced him, bled him, traumatized him. He is mine to hurt. I should be his ache in the cold, the weakness in his grip, his bleeding and sweating and shuddering in the night. I want to rend my bloody way into his shoulder. Bite out every keloid fiber of that interloper’s imprint on him. Reclaim his fevered, screaming flesh as mine, burned into his mind and body where I belong. When he wakes soaked in nightmare, I will be what he drips with, what he can’t shake off or breathe through._

What do you do, John wondered dizzily, when you discover that your flatmate has been fantasizing about your traumatic injuries?

Sherlock couldn’t have triggered John more efficiently if he’d deliberately set out to do it. One hundred measly words, and he could feel their undertow sucking him down into a windowless room of memory.

He fought his lungs down from crawling out his throat. This was a hell of a lot easier to deal with when he had something he could fight or run from. With the speedball of chemical fear response running amok in his bloodstream, his stupid, adrenaline-addicted PTSD brain didn’t know what to do with itself. It wasn’t sex, he _knew_ that, but his body was cross-wired and his pulse hurt his eardrums, and without the option of running _to_ or _from_ , he had trouble separating the different kinds of arousal.

John rubbed at his eyes. He wasn’t insane. God knew this set off alarm bells. God knew he’d seen this kind of possessiveness before—on cases he’d worked with Sherlock, no less, generally in the form of elaborate serial murders. But reading about his own shooting, the scars on his mind and body fetishised...effective labels for it escaped him. He couldn’t explain away Sherlock’s words sliding like a touch down into him.

No one had ever wanted to touch John in his scarred places; not in that memory or any of its mementos. He couldn’t blame them. Those places were painful and ugly, and wanting to avoid another person’s worst suffering was only sane. God knew John didn’t want to spread the pain around, but after so long of lovers pulling away from the thought, friends hearing it only as a war story, he’d never realised how starved he’d got. The thought of somebody _wanting_ to touch those parts of him, even like this...it uncoiled something in him that’d been wound tight for so long he’d forgotten about it.

‘Intimate’ should really not be the word to spring to mind. He was fairly certain ‘violated’ ought to feel more accurate than it did.

The thing was, he trusted Sherlock. Granted , there was the occasional _incident_ with his experiments, but Sherlock had never allowed John to come to harm in any of the ways that mattered. Wherever this was coming from, after all the ways Sherlock had saved him, John didn’t think he’d begrudge a pound of flesh if the man wanted it.

By all rights he should put this down and forget about it. It wasn’t written for him. But it was sure as hell _about_ him. Sherlock was such a part of his life. How could he let this go without understanding? John shivered. It certainly put a disturbing spin on all the times he’d asked himself if he let Sherlock get away with more than he ought. 

Feeling exposed, he moved over to the seat by the window to put his back to the wall.

_Today performed a study of abrasion patterns left by varying types of rope. John assisted by allowing me to test them on his own wrists. He had no idea of the effect it had on me, letting me injure him like that while he sat there, willingly offering up his bare arms to me. I saw the way the pain drew lines around his eyes, but he made no complaints. He’ll wear those marks for a week or more. My stomach tightens every time I think about them._

John remembered that. That had been a slow day a few months ago. Sherlock had been bored, casting about for a project, and John had been willing to agree to whatever it took to keep him from falling into one of his moods. They’d spent the afternoon at the kitchen table, John’s sleeves rolled up past the elbows while Sherlock knotted lengths of rope around his arms, repeatedly chafed him raw, and took notes.

It had seemed harmless at the time. Well, and it was, wasn’t it? Sherlock hadn’t done anything to him he hadn’t agreed to. But thinking back, John had caught a strange undercurrent between them. He’d assumed it was just him, the result of putting himself in Sherlock’s hands with the man’s full laser-guided attention on him. Those spasmodically graceful fingers dancing with exaggerated care over the knots, the building hyper-sensitivity of John’s skin from being roughed over and over—it had been…intense. Unique.

He might even have enjoyed it. 

John frowned at the thought. It was true that he liked having Sherlock’s attention. It sounded embarrassingly needy in a grown man, but he could admit to it in the privacy of his own mind. The physical contact had been nice, too, aside from the rope burns. They’d been at close quarters over Sherlock’s little experiment for a few hours, which was more touch than John tended to get in a week. He hadn’t even minded the pain. John had always enjoyed the flex of self-control that came with weathering small to moderate hurts, the way it set his body tingling with self-awareness. Having it inflicted by another person deliberately, consensually, carefully, had been...not frightening. The opposite of frightening. He’d relaxed, trusted Sherlock, known that it was just an exercise.

Though in retrospect...

_I had the most vivid image of coiling the rope around my hands and then pulling it taut around his neck._

_I suspect he would let me, if I asked him to trust me. He would let me close off his trachea, rub stinging raw marks across the fine skin of his throat. He wouldn’t struggle while I held him tight against me, unable to breathe. He would trust that I wouldn’t hurt him, that he would be safe in my hands. And he would be. As safe as I wanted him to be._

_If I released him to take a breath before wrapping him again, I wonder how many times he would let me? Coward not to have tried it!_

He’d trusted Sherlock. All the while the man had been sitting there, fantasizing about choking him. 

But Sherlock hadn’t hurt him. Sherlock hadn’t even asked.

John couldn’t stop his hand rising to his throat to trace a line under his Adam’s apple. The imaginary scene played vivid in his mind: Sherlock hard against his back, tight around his neck, John’s diaphragm spasming in confused attempts to obey its biological imperative. John’s stomach fluttered as he caught himself wondering what would’ve happened if Sherlock had asked.

He thought he might have stayed still. If Sherlock had asked... John could have said yes. He trusted enough. If he’d agreed, he wouldn’t have struggled while Sherlock squeezed the breath from him, would have believed in Sherlock’s assurances and his command of the situation.

Despite what he’d read here, part of him still wished Sherlock had asked. Christ. Maybe something was wrong with both of them.

_How far would I have to go, John, before you’d say no?_

_What would you do If I leaned over at breakfast and traced my fingers over your cheekbones? If I pressed my thumb in to feel your pulse in the hollow of your throat? What if I bent to kiss you? If I asked, “John, please, let me kiss you.” You’d let me. You wouldn’t push me away. It wouldn’t cost you anything, and you want so badly to please me._

_If I pressed you back into the wall, unbuttoned your shirt and slid my hands beneath, would you say no then? If I asked, “John, please, let me touch you.” You’d hesitate, but it’s me. If touching you would make me happy, what’s the harm in giving me what I want?_

_What if I lick the rim of your ear and tell you to kill a man for me? Would you bloody yourself at my behest? You’ve done it before, after all, without my permission. Then it was your decision; now it’s mine. See how much better that is?_

_A man’s blood on your hands, for my sake. John, may I touch you then? You’ll be so beautiful, thighs spread, slick with sweat and lifeblood with that fine quiver beneath your skin. Such a small thing after taking a life, to let me taste you mingled with him when I bite at your shoulders, thighs, stomach. It’s blissful, holding you writhing on me in sinuous curves, pristine, obscene and filthy with biology, coated with blood inside and out, unconcerned for the pathogens painting you with our victim’s retribution. You know I’ll never allow him to hurt you. You’ll lie beneath me, pleasured and trembling and not questioning whether you truly want this, because you would do anything to please me._

John's breath shuddered out. He fumbled the notebook into his lap and dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, but the image was already in his head. He could remember how it felt: the wet heat of blood soaking through his clothes, hands slippery with it, metallic scent choking thick in his throat. The crazed spark of being alive when people around you weren’t.

Jesus Christ. The hell of it was, he just might shoot a man if Sherlock really wanted him to. He felt lightheaded. The same blood coating both of them.

He’d had sex, once, straight out of a meat locker on an IED site. Surrounded by bone and gristle and the men they’d previously been part of, he’d ceased being human, all too aware of his status as ambulent flesh carrying out medical procedures. Afterwards he’d needed to remember how to feel so desperately that they hadn’t even waited to wipe down. Sticky-slick bodies and gouging grit and he’d felt like one raw, open nerve-

No, _Jesus Christ_ what was he... _No._ Just stop.

The journal sprawled across his lap like a potentially venomous snake. He scrubbed the memories away from his face with one hand while he pulled out his mobile to scan the newest messages. Sherlock wanted a football pitch. Did John know of any spare ones lying about?

John carded his hands through his hair and huffed a dry laugh. How were these the same man?

The question seemed suddenly, vitally important. Where did Sherlock the ridiculous, brilliant flatmate meet Sherlock, the... _this_? Sherlock would be chasing his experiments around London for hours yet. John had time.

_I want his mind. I want to climb in and inhabit him._

_Control his senses; dictate his reality. Lock him in the darkened world of his own body. Mine. All he feels and knows filtered to him through me. A means of mind control. How can I redefine him?_

_Tied to the bed, gagged, blindfolded, hearing stopped. Leave his sense of smell. The nose filters out familiar scents by nature; give him something to strain with. Naked, of course. Nothing allowed in contact with him but me. Even the air in that room is still. It will leave nothing against his skin but his restraints, the mattress, and my touch. My fingers on his lips when I feed him, my food—mindfully chosen—pressed against his tongue. My hands everywhere on him when I clean him. Without his distal senses, he sees with his skin. I’m a ghost to him, appearing and vanishing with our contact. Will he learn to detect my arrival in the minute movements of the air? Learn to smell the subtle cues of my presence?_

_The hallucinations will start within hours, dreams and waking converging once he’s divorced from his physical senses. But he’s always been so easy to read. The tension in his shoulders tells me whether he recognizes me. The arch of his spine will inform me if he senses danger. The furrow of his brow above his blindfold shows me his thoughts as clearly as if he were allowed to speak them._

_I can learn so much about him this way, crawl into him, wrap myself about him. What are his limits? How far can I take him? Experiment! He’ll be forced to reason based on my input. My routine defines his sense of time. I can make a month pass in two weeks, stretch a single endless day across three. Establish dual routines, embellished with different qualities and behaviours of contact. Can I make him believe there is more than one person? Make him doubt that I’m real? Would he convince himself that someone else is holding him captive while he waits for my rescue? If I deny him food, water, basic hygiene, how long before that tenacious stoicism of his breaks and he begs for it?_

_He’ll learn to crave me. I’ll become his tether to reality. If I leave him for days, busy with a case, his whole world will go with me. How long could he bear it, I wonder? How long could I keep him like this? How much could I do to him? Perhaps I would never let him up._

John put the notebook down on the sitting room table, closed his eyes and breathed. Hard.

_I want his mind._

Bound, gagged, blindfolded. God, it would be so exposed. Eyes, ears, mouth—as senses, they were contained. They could be directed, shut off. Skin was everywhere. He could be touched anywhere, in any way, and he couldn’t... _Stop thinking about it._

Sherlock owning him. He’d never even imagined someone getting inside him that way. It made him queasy, but at least the nausea was a sane response to this. He wrapped his arms around his middle, wishing desperately that he could force that unwelcome roil of lust into submission.

Captivity, pain, control, torture—that threat-adrenaline rush was still fucking with his arousal response, but amid all that, the thought of Sherlock’s _attention_ was frying his brain. Having his whole world hanging on a single touch, his body betraying him to let Sherlock seep into his mind... _Stop thinking about it._

 _I want his mind._ John squirmed, and tried not to wonder what having Sherlock in his mind would be like.

He flipped the page.

_I want his fear. I want his will. I want to take them, lap them up from his skin as he sweats them away. He won’t understand at first. He’ll shove me away, confused and annoyed, assuming I’m playing games. Only I won’t go. I’ll pull him into a clinch and watch for the realization that turns his face to stone. Feel his body snap taut when he understands what’s happening to him. Then it will be all fists, knees, elbows, limbs twisting with deadly intent. He’ll snarl with rage as I grapple him, trying furiously to drive me off. He feels so good: rough, purposeful, painful, holding him is like riding an angry tiger. He knows how to fight. He’s dangerous, he could hurt me if I let him. But I’m trained as well, and taller, stronger, heavier, with better reach and the advantage of momentum, and I’m already between his thighs before he can fully bring himself to bear. Control his hips and I control his leverage. My hands clamp crushingly on his wrists and I force him down, back, his body running hot, fierce and unyielding beneath mine._

_He’s still heaving under me. I let his struggles work for me while I tear his clothes away, baring him in swatches. I want him to feel me mastering him. He will give me nothing. I’ll take anything I want. I want everything._

_I want those first faltering motions, when he’s still fighting but he can’t quite keep up with me. I watch panic pool beneath fury in the creases of his face as it dawns that this isn’t luck. I’ve outlasted and outfought him, and this will be the outcome, every time. I tie his wrists tight with his own belt and watch the defeat settle like lethargy over him._

_He’ll try reasoning with me first. When that doesn’t work, he’ll thrash and shout. Finally, he’ll beg; he’ll hate that the most, but it will be just as deliciously futile as the rest. He gets his answer when I force his hips up for access, his spine torquing him in my grip. That hopeless will shimmers like heat waves across his skin, and I’ll savour it, right up until his pained shout when I force my way in to quench it._

_John, surrender is your only option. You’ll let me have you, because you’re well aware of the damage I’ll do if you don’t._

_But it’s not when you fear, is it? No, that moment will be when I kiss you as I come. Because I love you like this, overpowered, broken to my will._

“Jesus Christ.”

John threw down the notebook and stumbled into the kitchen to pull out the brandy. He poured a shot out into a mug—he couldn’t be arsed to find proper glasses just now—and tossed it back, then ran the faucet to splash water on his face.

How in hell was a man meant to deal with his flatmate having rape fantasies about him? What the fuck was he supposed to do when the images behind those words burned in him like a coal furnace?

This was fucked up. He tried that thought on, and found it held steady beneath him. He could acknowledge that. He didn’t know if he needed to worry about Sherlock. Good, yes, also solid. A question that needed answering. He—here was where he felt himself teeter—he liked—no. He was _physically responding_ —no. _Be honest with yourself, John._ A busted-up side of him that he normally tried his best to forget about found these scenarios _so fucking hot_ that John thought he might be losing his mind.

Never mind Sherlock, what the hell was wrong with _him?_

Standing in the middle of the kitchen, John covered his face with his hands and just _breathed_ for a while. Till he lost track of the walls around him and the crashing thoughts in his head, till the whirlwind of emotion died back into an eddy.

Dropping his hands, he drew one more deep breath into his lungs and felt it shake in his chest.

He made himself a cup of tea, lingering deliberately over each step of the old ritual, and then brought his mug back with him to the sitting room table where he’d abandoned the notebook.

This wasn’t just about Sherlock anymore. John felt a need to test how far _he_ went, as well. Was this the bottom, or did it keep getting worse? How mad _were_ they both?

_The tourniquet pulled tight, biting into his bicep just above the hollow of his elbow. I know that pain well—hard and flat on the median nerve, difficult to tolerate. I press my thumbnail into the soft flesh of that secret curve, find the vein, pierce him with the needle of the syringe. It sinks in and disappears into him, swallowed by his body._

_Cocaine? ~~Morphine?~~ No, I want him uncompromisingly alert._

_Cocaine, then. The high, the gleaming eyes, fevered awareness. Nervous system firing overtime. Would his mind light up like mine? Would his libido catch fire? Would he be desperate for sex or would I have to fight him down? I could fuck him right through his crash. Never done that. Would an orgasm counter the effects of the comedown?_

_ Experiment. _

John wrapped a hand around the crook of his right elbow. It was ridiculous—did he expect Sherlock to leap out of the closet with a syringe?—but he felt chilled, and appalled, and shamefully, sickly turned on.

This was Sherlock’s mind.

John had thought he’d understood the drugs. Knowing Sherlock…well. Knowing Sherlock seemed like explanation enough, but he’d got it all wrong. This wasn’t addiction at all. It was a ritual. This was…dragging John down into Sherlock’s head the same as Sherlock had written about climbing into John’s earlier.

Lighting him on fire from the inside out, filling him up with sensation till he split open and screamed for mercy. Sherlock was proposing to…not share, no, to _inflict_ it on John, fighting him down every step of the way because there was no way in hell John would ever say yes to shooting cocaine.

It didn’t matter what he wanted, though, did it? He felt like one of Sherlock’s experiments: there to indulge the mad impulses kicking around in Sherlock’s head, to be dissected till all his secrets lay open to the air for the satisfaction of that penetrating fucking gaze.

He fisted his right hand against his mouth to stop it from flexing. Sherlock’s intellect enticed John and terrified him in equal measure. Having it directed at him could be dangerous...and the promise of danger had driven John to all his most ridiculous decisions. Sherlock had a mind lined with blades, and John knew intimately the kind of damage they could direct inwards as well as outwards.

But he wanted it. Oh, God, God, did he want it. So badly that he could almost say yes to the drugs after all.

He had to move on, for sheer self-preservation. Nothing past this could be as barbed and tempting as this. He could _kill_ himself on this if he wasn’t careful.

_I want to carve him. Turn him into living art._

_I need a delicate blade. A scalpel? No, that’s his, for healing. A fine knife, slim-bladed, easy to control. A boning knife or hunter’s knife, a kard would be appropriate, but it must be beautiful. Worthy of him._

_London._

_I will carve my map of London into his body. The two things that are mine, that only I can know this way. Lambeth over his right kidney, Westminster up his left side. The Thames a sinuous line weaving along his spine. Yes. My map of London will become a map of him. From Ludgate Hill to Eastcheap, I’ll be cresting his thigh, and Baker Street will wrap around his left shoulder. Would have to recut periodically, as London is redrawn, so that he would always be up to date. My John._

Hands over his mouth, John let out a sob.

_I’m so fucking dead._

He would say yes. He felt himself shaking. He would say yes if Sherlock ever asked. He didn’t want to—he wanted to run screaming--but he’d be powerless. In the face of this. Sherlock’s London. As powerless as he always was to say no.

The last one, he read twice, then laid his head down on his folded arms.

_I want everything._

_I want in every part of you, John, too deep for you to ever get away. I can’t have so much of you living untouched and unmarked by me where anyone could come and claim you instead._

_I’ll burrow through the skin of your back to feel along your sacrum, wallow in the serpent curve of your spine, pour into the hidden hollows of your pelvis. Push my fingers into your belly button, your ears, press them at your eyes. Tease at your exposed nerves, unadulterated by intervening, meddling flesh. I’ll kiss away your hisses of pain, bite your lips raw, and sip the blood from your mouth. I want to feel your trachea crumple under my hand, so that I can hear the marks I leave on your voice when you beg me to stop._

_I’ll thrust into you, god, so deep, over and over again, but it’s not satisfying. Not enough of you, John, too accessible. I need into your secret places. I’ll carve wounds along your intercostals and claw my fingers into them, dig in and drag between your ribs to savour my occupation of the forbidden chambers of your body. I’ll retrace my path with my tongue, to learn the interior taste of you. When you cry out, I’ll shove my fingers into your mouth to hush you, and stroke your tongue to soothe you. Don’t distract yourself with protests, John. I’m already inside you. I know everything you could say._

_Your life will gurgle and spill across us in hot sheets, wind us together in vivid sheaths of red liquid silk. You’ll fight to escape, kicking and biting with every dirty trick you can think of, even as your limbs grow clumsy with sex and me. No fear in you, my John, you never cower when you can fight. You will be beautiful, fierce and hard and warm, golden and bare and vulnerable to me._

_Laid open for me. You can’t hide from me, can you? You don’t want to, even if you could. You want me to see everything. And I will, John. I’ll open your chest, occupy your viscera, keep paring you down until I reach the raw, naked flicker of your soul and cup it in my hands. I know I can find it._

_I won’t stop until I’ve stripped you of everything. Everything, John. Down to the very last of you._

It was a madman’s love letter. The skin over John’s entire body went hot and tight. To be _wanted_ like this...it was insane, and absolute. No one could survive being owned so thoroughly, but sweet Christ, a man could want to find out how close he could get.

Sherlock was bottled lightning. Mind, body, lifestyle, enemies, _friends,_ he was practically custom-built to get a man killed. His tongue could draw blood at 100 paces. His attention was a weapon of mass destruction. He’d flayed John open with nothing but his brain and a smartphone the night after they’d met. John had been addicted to danger before he’d ever enlisted, and Sherlock...

In hindsight, he should have seen this coming from the start.

After a while, John slipped the notebook back into the pile where he’d found it. Sherlock would know John had touched it, but would have no reason to assume he’d read it.

John couldn’t walk away from this, but he wasn’t sure whether he could survive it either. Whether anything he’d read stood any chance of happening was beside the point. It was Sherlock. If Sherlock could want him badly enough to envision doing such things to him, then John wasn’t sure where he’d draw the line.

He didn’t want to talk about this. No one with even a fragment of sanity wanted to have a conversation that began ‘I think you might be a serial killer, and I think that might be the hottest thing I’ve ever heard of.’ 

***

He didn’t think about it for the next several days. When he woke up sweating with fear and painfully hard, he rolled over and wanked himself doggedly back to sleep, mind carefully blank of images. When he sat down for breakfast, he didn’t ask himself what Sherlock had on his mind that made him so quiet. If Sherlock’s stares across the back of a cab had intensified, John took no notice, and for Sherlock’s part, if he’d noted the tumbled papers or John’s persistent avoidance of his eyes, he said nothing. It was blissful, determined incuriosity on all sides until the next dead body.

She’d been tortured and then killed with an ice pick to the medulla by someone who knew what they were doing. And it wasn’t that John was getting off on her death. It was just that the marks on her body were practically a flowchart of ‘thoughts John wasn’t having’ for the past week. Ligature marks. Burns on her arms. Branding. Ligament damage at her joints from extended periods of suspension. At least three different bladed tools. Blunt trauma, administered over at least 18 hours with multiple tools.

John’s face must be a picture. Lestrade kept shooting him worried glances while he listened to Sherlock rattle off facts with the emotional engagement of a typewriter. Ever since his foray through the darkened corners of Sherlock’s brain, John’s empathy was ticking along in overdrive. He couldn’t stop projecting himself in the victim’s place: blindfolded and handcuffed to something over his head, joints aching under his own helpless weight. Every remaining sense alight, his mind scrabbling for any scrap of data in reach. His body tense with directionless expectation while an invisible someone circled him, slowly etched him with knives and rods and burning cigarettes.

He wanted to find and shoot the monster that’d done this to an innocent woman. Except that his traitorous brain supplied Sherlock in the role of tormentor to John’s victim, which led to a different set of reactions entirely.

When that image popped into his head, he knew it was time to get the hell out before he completely embarrassed himself at the crime scene. Only when he glanced over to beg off, he saw Sherlock, sitting back on his heels beside the dead woman, already watching him. Poor as the lighting was in here, John didn’t think that was the reason Sherlock’s eyes looked so voraciously black.

When he finally got home, wet and chilled from prowling London in an October rain, he changed into his most comfortable lounging clothes and lay on his bed in a fugue. Sleep was a joke; he didn’t even try.

When he came back downstairs, Sherlock was draped sideways over his favourite chair with his laptop on his stomach.

No point trying to sneak up on it. John slapped a hand on top of the paper stack to pull the notebook out and dropped it into Sherlock’s lap.

Sherlock confronted it with the kind of noncommittal blankness he presented to guns waved in his face. “Ah.”

“Yes,” John agreed. “It was memorable.” Sherlock would wait till a cold day in Hell if he expected apologies for trespassing. Some violations outclassed others.

“Hm.” Sherlock might as well have been carved of alabaster for all the expression on him. They were probably a matched set at the moment.

Finally, John motioned towards the notebook. “Alright. So. What should I do about this?”

“You’re asking _me?_ ” Sherlock’s mouth actually sagged open. Flat-out shock was not an expression one got to see on that face very often. “I’m reasonably certain the sane response would be to run as fast as possible in the other direction.”

“Well...” John considered that. “Yeah. Admittedly. But I don’t seem to be much for sanity, do I?” He squared his shoulders and took his composure in a death grip. “Alright, then, important question: do you want to kill me?”

“No.” Sherlock exhaled slowly. “No, of course not. John, if I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

“Then what was... What was all that?”

“All that.” Sherlock hesitated, then grimaced. “Fantasies. Nothing more.” 

_Liar._ He couldn’t say how he knew, but there it was. Bloody hell. John rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger, trying not to look like he’d just been hit by a surge of angry, scared adrenaline. Stay calm. Stay precise. If one of them flew off the handle, they’d both go, and he didn’t want to see how ugly that row could get. “Sherlock. The way you were staring at me at the crime scene. What were you seeing?”

Sherlock looked away.

“Shall I tell you what I was thinking?” John pressed. “Or do I need to? Do you already know?”

A muscle in Sherlock’s jaw jumped.

A palpable hit, as they said in Shakespeare. John plunged forward, taking no mercy on either of them. “I was imagining myself in that poor woman’s place. Living through what she lived through. Being taken apart at _your_ hands. That’s what you were watching, wasn’t it.” He didn’t really need to make it a question. The hard bob of Sherlock’s throat was eloquent enough. “Sherlock.” He waited till his friend’s eyes moved back to him. “If you don’t want to kill me, then what do you want?”

Sherlock closed his laptop with a snap and set it down on the floor, then swung around to sit in the chair properly, for all the world as easy as a king on his throne. John strongly suspected that Sherlock was just about as ready to do a header out their windows as John was. “It’s got nothing to do with killing,” he repeated. “I’m quite fond of you alive.” He glanced down at the notebook cradled in his clever fingers, then back up. “It’s about holding your life in my hands.”

John sucked on his cheek. He thought about what he’d read. He thought about his own reactions to it. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I can see that. But this. This isn’t sex. It’s...”

“Possession,” Sherlock supplied helpfully, and then sat forward to turn that laser-guided stare on John. “Why haven’t you run away, John?”

John couldn’t have said whether it was the eyes or the question that knocked the breath out of him, but he found himself incapable of making a sound, let alone answering.

Whatever Sherlock saw seemed to answer the worries that had etched the furrow in his brow, because he came to his feet. Two steps brought him into John’s personal space, where Sherlock tilted his face up with fingers under his jaw. “Tell me you don’t feel it, John,” he said quietly. “Tell me you’d be this alive anywhere else, doing anything else. Tell me I don’t already own you, just a little.”

It was John’s turn to look away. Sherlock was right. Of course he was. John had chosen this life for himself, and right this minute he was where he wanted to be. That was why he’d initiated this conversation despite the fact he’d just as soon have got himself shot again. 

But he wasn’t chattel. These weren’t bondage games Sherlock was proposing, and he’d eat John alive if John let him. That was, he understood in a flash of insight, part of the appeal. “But my staying will not be contingent on behaving according to your rules.”

“I don’t have rules, John,” Sherlock scoffed. “I’d thought you’d figured that out by now. I do what I like when I want to do it. And so do you.” A long, fine hand slid down John’s neck to encircle it just below his Adam’s apple. His fingers spanned the better part of the circumference of John’s throat. “And of your own free will, you’ll choose to let me do this.”

Sherlock’s thumb dug into the cartilage of John’s trachea when he swallowed. His body thrummed with the tightening of Sherlock’s grip. He didn’t protest or pull away when he felt his air cut off.

After thirty seconds or so, Sherlock let go, pleased. “Do you trust me?”

John didn’t need to think about that. He did trust Sherlock, sometimes implicitly but never blindly. Having to kill a man the first night of their acquaintance had a way of illuminating the risks. He smiled. “I like to live dangerously.”

Sherlock’s answering grin was incandescent.

***

Fingers prodding at John’s bruised neck roused him. He opened his eyes to find Sherlock matching his hands to the patterns that had flowered across John’s throat in the night. “I’ve never been particularly fond of jewellery,” Sherlock rumbled into his shoulder. “But as necklaces go, this one does flatter you. You know it matches your eyes?”

John tipped his head toward Sherlock. Even that small movement pulled all the way down his spine. He was going to be in whole constellations of pain once his body woke up, but for now it remained a sleepy promise of things to come. Moving gingerly, he lifted one of Sherlock’s aristocratic hands to nip lightly at the matching mottling he’d left on the pale forearm. “I notice that I’m not dead.”

Sherlock lifted his head to grace John with an amused curl of his lip. “Well spotted.” John glared back, but his heart wasn’t in it. Sherlock and his ‘look at your little brain’ sneer. God. You’d never guess, to look at him, that he’d just spent most of the previous night lacerating his flatmate.

He felt like he’d done a forced march in full kit. Or been beaten thoroughly with sticks. That was closer to the facts.

A hot, sprawling sting across his back reminded him of the scratches covering his shoulders. Right. Sherlock had mauled them during a disagreement over whether he got to use the Leatherman from the mantel to cut John open. John had protested violently; he had an adversarial relationship with gangrene. Though he suspected he’d won mainly because Sherlock had got distracted with fucking him partway through.

Watching the memories pass over John’s face, Sherlock gave him another lazy smile and stroked a hand over his trapezius. The warmth felt blissfully therapeutic; beneath the scratches, John’s back was beginning to turn into a cement slab.

Nice as it was to lie here and soak up Sherlock’s undivided attention, it was time to get moving before John ended up completely immobile. He took a fortifying breath, then levered himself up with a groan, only to be seized by a scream of protest from _every muscle in his body_ when Sherlock shoved him back down into the bedclothes with a hard hand on his chest.

“No, don’t move.” Sherlock's voice was a velvety threat. As if there were any danger of him moving: John’s muscles had locked up so that it took a moment before he could even breathe. Sherlock smiled and settled in against him, a warm, restraining weight along his right side. Then, because he was a bastard, he wrapped his hand pointedly around John’s left hip.

It flowered into agony at the contact. John’s gasp turned into a drawn-out hiss when the burn flared hotter rather than dying back. It felt like Sherlock had _flayed_ him. “Jesus! Fuck! Sherlock!” He forced down the impulse to struggle. Sherlock obviously had no intention of letting go, and in this state, fighting him would only be a lesson in pain. “What’d you-”

He broke off. Sherlock wasn’t paying attention to him; he was studying his handiwork, hand trailing contentedly through the mess he’d etched into John’s hip with no regard for the hot wires of pain it sent curling through John’s body.

John rolled his eyes. Dismissed in favour of Sherlock’s wallowing in his own massive self-satisfaction, as usual. He twisted up to get a look for himself—fuck, it hurt to bend—only for Sherlock’s grip to tighten chastisingly. In lieu of screaming, John kneed Sherlock as viciously as he could, right in the long, deep-red bruise he’d battered into Sherlock’s inner thigh last night.

Sherlock took the punishment in stride, a pained grunt the only sign he’d felt it. When John fell back, shaking, Sherlock eased his grasp into feather-light, soothing strokes. Right. No moving. Message received. John settled for craning his neck for a glimpse of the stinging patterns Sherlock’s fingers were still chasing across his skin. “What did you do?” he asked again after a moment, more softly.

Lips quirking, Sherlock finally moved his hand so that John could see. 

His left hip was spider-webbed with winding, wobbling cuts that spilled down over the top and side of his thigh. The instant he laid eyes on them, they started throbbing.

It looked like a disaster area, a patchwork snarl of knife wounds and crusts and streaks of blood. But when Sherlock had held him down and begun cutting last night, he’d been painstaking. John hadn’t been allowed to so much as twitch in pain, lest he interfere with the laying of one of those scrawls.

Leaning up just enough to see John’s face, Sherlock watched him, obviously waiting for some sort of epiphany. When John frowned and looked up at him, Sherlock heaved a sigh and traced his fingers along a particular knot of...streets, he remembered. Oh god.

“London,” he breathed.

Then he was being kissed, Sherlock’s mouth heavy on his and slow with demand, seeking out every bit of John’s amazement as though it were a rare flavour.

By the time he finally let John up for air, the implications had set in and John was shivering with them. In awe, he reached down to brush his fingers over the wounds. The detail was terrifying. Sherlock had spent ages on this last night, and it was only the first of John’s 18 square feet of skin. He was looking at the future of his body, at Sherlock’s power over him, desires for him—labelled, categorized, _mapped_. Christ, and he’d thought he felt exposed before. He felt like he was wearing Sherlock, and he’d never felt so naked.

Sherlock watched John explore his transformed body, features soft with pleasure. This was John’s, too, not just Sherlock’s. His body, his flesh, his consent. More or less.

It was overwhelming. 

Sherlock brushed his fingers against John’s, unable to keep his hands to himself. "Well, John? You're in possession of all the facts." His nails dug into one of the lines. "Surely you can recognize the pattern?"

John frowned down at it, watching his blood well up and bead where Sherlock's attentions had broken open the cut. Then something about the shape resolved. "Paternoster Square. St. Paul's." His eyes widened. "It's St. Bart's!"

Ludgate Hill to Eastcheap over the crest of his thigh.

Sherlock grinned wickedly and dug his thumb into John’s scar. “I should hope you at least recognize Baker Street.” John arched and shouted in shock at the needling cascades of pain that shot through his damaged nerves.

In retribution, John thumped the great git on the bite mark he’d left on Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock hissed, then laughed and pressed a kiss to the spot he’d just abused. John knew better than to take it for an apology. He didn’t care.

Baker Street, wrapped around his left shoulder.

He held Sherlock’s head close, lips pressed against the spot on John’s shoulder that signified home.

**Author's Note:**

> Translated into Russian here: <http://ficbook.net/readfic/749010>


End file.
